Something in the function tutorial confused me.

[Stargaming]

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:13:45 +0000, Alex Popescu wrote:

> Stargaming <stargaming at gmail.com> wrote in news:46b6df49$0$26165
> $9b622d9e at news.freenet.de:
> 
[snip]
>> 
>> You're just unluckily shadowing the name `y` in the local scope of
> your
>> function. Your code snippet could be rewritten as::
>> 
>>   def f(x, y=None):
>>     if y is None: my_y = []
>>     else: my_y = y
>>     my_y.append(x)
>>     return my_y
>> 
>> HTH,
>> Stargaming
> 
> For the given example this will continue to print:
> 
>> print f(23)  # prints [23]
>> print f(42)  # prints [42]
> 
> so this doesn't solve/explain OP's initial question. A previous post has
> already clarified the reasons for seeing this normal behavior.
> 
> bests,
> ./alex

If it keeps normal behaviour, that's exactly what it ought to explain. In 
his local scope, there is an `y`, having the value of f.func_defaults. 
Because it's harder to see "hey, in some cases, y vanishes, in some it 
survives", I invented the new local reference `my_y` -- which should be 
clear to go away after completion of the function body.

Regards,
Stargaming